Tuesday, May 8, 2012

I have been asked in the past week by multiple people what are some good resources to use when working with the Dojo Toolkit. The following is far from an all inclusive list, but they are the resources I use when working with the Dojo Toolkit. Please feel free to post other Dojo resources in the comments.

The Dojo Module

I find myself using Dojo's Reference Guide when working with
functions in the dojo module. These tend to be non ui widgets that are utilities. These areas include but are not limited to:

dojo.xhrGet, xhrPost

dojo.Deferred

dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore

dojo.store.Memory

dojo.connect, dojo.subscribe

dojo.query

The Dijit Module

The Dijit Theme Tester provides a good catalog to browse the UI widgets in the dijit namespace. I have the source code on my development machine and when I am looking to modify the behavior of a widget, I look directly in the source code. The Reference Guide gives some basic examples for the widgets. The tests are also a good source options and configuration examples. I don't usually load a test in the browser, I just browse the tests to see the examples.

The DojoX Module

The code that exists in the DojoX module is experimental and not guaranteed to maintain its API from release to release. Code stays here because of a number of reasons including not being properly documented. Lack of documentation can make using a piece of code difficult to use. Using code in this module almost always requires diving into the source code to make it work.